Case of Reeve
by Licoriceallsorts
Summary: Civil society is collapsing in the post-Meteor world. Reeve decides to take action, but not all of his old Avalanche friends approve of his methods. The story of how the WRO came into being. written for the prompt: "Something post-OG with Reeve, funding, good intentions, politics, and Avalanche friends"


"Wherever he goes the stench of death isn't far off."

_Case of Denzel_

* * *

On that day, the chosen day, as Meteor began it final descent towards Midgar, Director Reeve Tuesti, hurled himself against the locked door of his office on the sixty-fifth floor of the Shinra Building, trying in vain to break out. Lightning crackled in the sky. Red dust devils ripped tiles from rooftops and threw them about like thistledown - Reeve ducked as one came flying in through the jagged hole that had once been his panoramic executive window. His fellow Directors, Heidegger and Scarlet, had imprisoned him here and now they were dead and he was starting to lose hope that anyone would remember he was here. The reactors had failed, the power was dead. The only light came from Meteor's bloody death-glow. All the employees must have fled the building by now.

The smell of hot earth and sulphur mingled in his nostrils with the lingering stench of scorched paint and stressed metal. Less than seventy-two hours had passed since Weapon's fireball ripped through the top floor of the building, immolating everything in its path: the science labs, the presidential suite, the young President himself. Precarious as a house of cards, the Shinra Tower swayed in the winds that howled up and down the stairwells. Reeve had pushed his animatronic's CGI visor up onto his forehead, the better to see what he was doing here in his own office. The microphone hung around his neck. Grit kept blowing into his eyes. The whole city creaked and groaned and trembled.

One more he slammed against the door, forgetting, in his panic, that it opened inward. "Help!" he cried. "Let me out! I don't want to die!"

Through the earpiece he heard Tifa's voice, faint and tinny with distance, call out, "Hey! I'm glad everyone's okay!"

"I'm not okay!" he shouted. "I'm stuck here! I'm trapped! Please - "

Someone was rattling the door handle from the other side. A woman's voice cried, "Hold on sir, I've got a key."

"Polly?"

"Lady Luck, don't fail me now," Cid's voice crackled in his earpiece.

The door burst open, and a rather lovely young blonde woman clutching a torch tumbled into his arms. "Reeve, are you all right?"

She was a very junior employee in his department, and normally he would have rebuked her for addressing him by his first name. However, this particular young woman was allowed a certain leeway, not only because standing on formalities seemed ridiculous given their current life-or-death situation, but also because in her intern days the two of them had enjoyed some happy romps on the big executive leather sofa in his office. Since then she'd been promoted to deputy assistant infrastructure manage for Upper Three, and their romping had ceased when she realised he wasn't serious about a future together and had found herself a fiancé in the corporate branding division. Reeve had been more relieved than anything. He'd made it clear to her from the start that he was married to his job.

All the same, he was extremely glad to see her.

"Let's get out of here," he shouted.

They ran for the stairs. "Do you think the building's going to fall down?" she shouted breathlessly.

"Fall down? No," he shouted back. "I built this thing to last." It was the lightning he feared, and the flying objects. This wind could reach in through the holes Weapon had punched in the walls, grab a man and toss him out as easily as if he were a leaf.

In the course of their headlong flight down sixty-three flights of stairs, they stumbled across many other employees, lost and frightened and looking for someone to tell them what to do, who latched onto the Director of Urban Development like drowning men grabbing for a life buoy. On the cafeteria floor they picked up three cooks and a dishwasher; on the SOLDIER floor, a dozen third classes and some materia scientists; on the mail-room floor, a terrified teenager named Trevor; and on almost every floor, Heidegger's Public Safety Maintenance troopers, bravely holding the posts to which they had been assigned earlier that day. Reeve ordered them to come with him.

"Everybody, to the slums!" he cried.

"Will we be safe there?" Trevor shouted.

Reeve was not a man normally given to foul language, but - "How the fuck do I know?" he shouted back. A gust of wind blew his words away before anyone could hear them. All he knew was that they'd be slightly safer under the plate than on top of it, at least until Meteor fell. Once that happened, probably the best place to be was wherever you would die fastest.

He started running in the direction of the Sector One station, and the others followed him, collecting more terrified lost souls as they went. Fear lent their feet wings. As they hurdled the turnstiles in the train station, an unbelievable noise rent the air, a scream of metal grinding against metal, a hiss like the unzipping of the universe, a noise so huge, so ominous, so far outside anyone's experience, that Reeve couldn't understand it and had to turn around and look.

The whole of the outer section of the fifth plate had been ripped clean off its moorings and was flying fifty feet above their heads as if it weighed nothing - like a gigantic petal torn from a flower. Everyone instinctively ducked. Reeve assured himself he'd only imagined the bodies he thought he saw falling.

"Keep going," he shouted. "Down the tracks! Don't stop!"

He couldn't have said how long they ran. Time had taken on the consistency of a dream. Eventually they reached the earth and threw themselves onto it, panting, weeping, vomiting. Above their heads the plates rattled and grated; the support pillars trembled. Debris rained down on them: brick dust and pebbles, stone chips and scraps of paper, cigarette ends and bottle caps…. Reeve wondered if he'd made a mistake leading them here. No one, surely, had forgotten Sector Seven. Some of his evacuees rocked back and forth, moaning. Some knelt and prayed. Trevor lay supine on the ground, arms flung wide, as if embracing his fate.

The wind died down, and in the brief lull before it picked up again Reeve heard the faint squeak of voices somewhere in the region of his collar-bone. The comms-phone earpiece had fallen out. He put it back in, and lifted his hand to pull down the visor, only to find it gone. His means of connecting to Cait Sith's eyes had been lost somewhere on the way down. He hadn't even noticed it fall.

Static crackled in his ear. He adjusted the dial, and Barret's voice came through, faint but clear. "What the hell's gonna happen to Midgar?"  
He fumbled for the microphone and lifted it to his lips. "I've been moving everybody to the slums, but with the way things are now - "

"It's too late for Holy," said Red XIII.

"Where are you?" Reeve shouted. "What's going on?"

A high-pitched whistling filled his ears. Through the cracks in the plate above, he glimpsed an unearthly, intensifying radiance, bluish-white in hue, cool like milk. The temperature was dropping. All the little hairs on his arms and neck stood on end. Fingers of the radiant light probed between the plates and illuminated the slums, bright as halogen searchlights. Reeve screwed his eyes shut. In his ears he could feel the air-pressure mounting. The pain was unbearable. Everyone groaned. Two little children they'd picked up somewhere along the way began screaming.

_These are my final moments_, he thought.

He didn't know where Cloud and the others were, but he wished he were with them. Even if they were still down inside the crater. Anywhere had to be safer than this. He wished he'd taught one of them how operate Cait Sith once he was gone. He wished he hadn't spent so much of his life being a coward. He wished he'd gone to see his mother more regularly; he wished he hadn't been such a slave to his work. He wished he'd tried harder to talk President Shinra out of dropping the Sector Seven plate. Not that it really mattered now, he supposed -

"What's that?" shrieked a voice.

Reeve opened his eyes.

A sinuous filament of green light - no, not light, _mako _\- was heading straight for them, moving like a sine wave, smooth, swift, inexorable. He had seen this phenomenon before, or something like it. Whenever Cloud and his party had killed a monster, its dead body had evaporated into swirls of this very same substance.

Over there, another.

"It touched me!" a woman screamed.

And another - and another - soon, too many to count.

The rays of mako swerved upwards into the sky, converging on Meteor.

"This is it!" Reeve yelled at anyone who might be able to hear him. "Protect yourselves! Take cover!"

Spotting a large cable spool lying not far away, Reeve darted over, crawled inside it, and wrapped his head in his hands.


End file.
